Tuesday will be the occasion of my 100th podcast of the Virtual Concerts. It is fitting that my guest at this milestone, will be Dr. Michele Dionne, wetlands expert from the Wells NERR in Wells, Maine. We will discuss the accelerated pace of erosion and storm damage from loss of wetlands as global warming accelerates. We have collaborated formally & informally since 1993. The goal of this episode will be to explore exactly how this continued relationship can contribute towards and be a model for solving the problems we face in coastal regions.
Last night I had dinner with my best friend, still thinking about the symposium on "Unlearning Intolerance" I had attended at the United Nations Thursday, got to bed late and woke at least five times in the night. This morning, I didn't ask myself how tired I was. I responded to several emails, did my singing practice, attended an on-line meeting, had a nourishing breakfast and set off for a ballet class. People think if you have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, you are too tired to function. Altho that's often true, other times it's possible to act as if you feel like a normal person. Then the fatigue sets in afterwards, lingering for days.
Sort of like using energy & resources we don't have in the larger human community relying on fossil fuels.
At 12:30, on my way home, I did some food shopping, lingering over possibilities of lavendar aromatherapy spray and settiling for Calm tea and salad dressing made with artichokes and had it all delivered, for which I paid $4. I was determined to have a normal day, like a normally healthy person, regardless of how much I might collapse afterwards.
After a sumptuous & leisurely lunch, over a half hour, of salad with the artichoke dressing I had bought, salmon and turkey slices, crackers and completed with a 1 oz square of dark chocolate, I went to a Chinese medicinal massagist who worked hard on me for one hour. I did not think about the fossil fuels to deliver any of the ingedients of my lunch. On the massage table, I thought about how I might solve some work problems I was considering since the United Nations events and tried to relax, even after having seen the chart with the prices on it. He charged me $120. He told me that I am weak and have a chronic condition. Apparently, the only remedy he had was for me to come as many days as possible a week, perhaps for the rest of life, for $120. each time. At that rate, I had better have a short life. Sort of like human culture, as Jim Hanson says, in the face of global warming?
I am considering how 350.org, composed entirely of young people fighting to get emissions standards to 350 parts, could work with more jaded & experienced people, as myself.
At home, I did a deep conditioning on my hair, ignored the drawn and pale woman in the mirror, put on a face mask, studied some work that is due next week for a book out of Germany: how can I condense all I know, think and have done onto one page that reads clearly (?) and tried not to think about what it might cost me out of my spending plan to feel normal after a normal day for more than one day. Then I washed my clothes and cleaned the bathtub.
It is 4:45 PM. Perhaps $124. and bed rest to follow, is not a bad price for a vacation. Tomorrow is another day.
Recently, an arts adminsitrative colleague posed the question of why it's so hard to engage artists in the conceptual process, early in the team prrocess of public art. She knows the reason isn't the interest of artists but the attachment of others to commodified objects from artists.
As an artist very committed to the conceptual & intellectual process I find her efforts important.
As an artist with CFS, I find it tiresome and discouraging that so far down the line of the kinds of ideas that she's referencing, the battle is still up such a steep slope.
The reasons it's hard to get across new ideas about public, ecological art are simple. The attachment of the powers to be, funders, officials to the enshrined but undemanding object is sentimental. It keeps artists in cages, where we can't do damage to the status quo.
Rosylynn Deutsche said it best, a while back: the culture will support what supports the status quo.
The past few days, I've been in touch with some young people who've started a new site, 350.org, to address global warming internationally. I offered my help and advice as an ecological artist. I have been very moved by the freshness and enthusiasm of their vision. Bill McKibben is guiding them and he is in touch with Jim Hansen. McKibben writes of the mission of this site:
"350 is the red line for human beings, the most important number on the planet. The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth."
It is now at 383 parts. Their immediate target is coal. They expect to virtually mobilize young people globally to engage in activism and want input from artists: a good thing. Previously, the same group initiated "step it up 2007" which mobilized 1500 actions nationally.
This past week, my stamina has steadily dwindled as I've struggled to show up for professional & personal obligations. Tonight, a busy neighbor called and offered to help me do my laundry tomorrow morning. I am very grateful for her kind generosity.
The connection between 350.org, these personal events, my CFS and global warming, is that we might just make it, with a little help from our friends.
Earlier today, I did a Virtual Concert with Steffin Keulig, Sacha Kagan and Lena, about the film work they recently completed about life in Karamoja, Africa, near Uganda. The conversation highlighted how fragile, complex and delicate the neccessary interfaces are that we must make between third and first world cultures in these times of population pressure, resource dwindling and climate change.
Living with CFS, isn't the same as struggling to feed starving children on the streets of Kampala, while bleeding from a gang rape, which is not an unusual expereince in Africa, these days, but it does hold some symbolic parallels between how we, as a species are coping with personal limitation and tragedy these days and how we are collectively dealing with the exigencies of global warming.
I returned Sunday from three days at a symposium in Ithaca, that was otherwise exciting, in terms of talking to energized young people and sharing reflections with colleagues, spent the day immoilized in bed yesterday and then rallied to attend Grant Kester's lecture at Cooper Union on art in the intersticial fringes between activism and artifact and then shared sopme felafel with Lillian Ball, en route to work on the Seville Bienalle, about yearning for someone equally thoughtful to write about the kinds of work being done by dynamically oreinted eoclogical artists.
I am still functioning today. After all I did the podcast, responded to about ten professional emails about work, moved my car and did some research reading & thinking and it's now 1:PM. What I didn't do was exercize, my singing practice or eating sensibly. When I stand I am dizzy. Walking is an effort of will to move my body despite weakened muscles. Thinking is at the cost of a splitting headache. My shoulder msucles are in spasm. Shortly, I will have to lie down, probably for most of the rest of the day. But somehow I need to complete and send a written proposal with visuals for an event at MIT due tomorrow. It is necessary to push myself to function because I cannot earn a living if I'm invisible nor can I afford to park my car in a garage or alternately, not move it from one side of the street to the other to avoid several hindred dollars in parking tickets.
One of the articles I read while sitting in my car, was in Vanity Fair's green issue, on the eroding life of polar bears and how they may now be competing with grizzlies for food resources. The rape survivor in Africa is the bycatch collateral victim of increased cinflicts over resources. The bears are dislocated by melting ice and changing weather patterns that effect their food supply. Chornic Fatigue Syndrome is just another in a long list of new and poorly understood illness that limit personal resoiurces. In each case, there is a limitation on resources and a struggle to survive despite pain, despite limitation. Amongst humans, the competition for resources is exacerbated by population increases and increased demands on resources from developed countries. collateral damage for all species is increased as a consequence.
So whether you're a raped woman in Africa, a person with an immune system disability or a polar bear in the Arctic, many of us are learning to compete for resources and survive despite limitation. And many of us will not survive. And it won't be fair. It will exact a high price of grief for anyone who is sane.
I find my own definition of sustainable is constantly evolving and I suspect this may be an important point to consider in any discussion of sustainability: that it is a fluid and moving target.
The question I have is related to this same thought, re: the decision that is being given a lot of attention in the liberal press here in the states, for Europe to rely on coal again. China’s overwhelming reliance on building new coal refineries is troubling enuf, but I was shocked to learn that some European plants are converting to coal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/europe/23coal.html?th&emc=th
I wonder what others, esp from Europe might comment about this?
In my own work, what I keep returning to is the question of population: pressure for energy, food, water that is being supplied with coal, biofuels, Monsanto-type products, building densities, over-fishing, etc. This is causing irremedial problems whose source seems to go back over & over to population control. Yet no one seems willing to address this head on re: sustainability.
To return to my recent theme of correlaries with CFS, a recurrent issue is how whatever this illness is, it seems to mutate the symptoms. But what is consistent is that any effort based on driving myself, stress, exertion of any kind, seems to exacerbate symptoms, whether I have control of events or not- a shift in weather, someone else's distress- everything affects me and my illness. I do meditate and so on yet things activate my CFS anyway. Symptoms range from swollen glands & low grade fever, to msucle spasms, to sleep disturbance, to irritability to fiantness and so on. In other words, any effort to exert myself past my limits, has an impact that reveals how unsustainable CFS makes life. The analogy I see is that the earth simply cannot sustain more people. It is too fragile. I cannot sustain equilibrium under any added (normal) load because my system has become likewise fragile. The earth cannot accomodate a demand for more food, water or energy past a finite point of no return. It responds as unpredictably as CFS does with me, with inexplicable located tornados, droughts, food riots and cliamte extremes that require us to retrench. Likewise, CFS requires me to accept that any jostling of my status quo has an impact that requires me to be immobilized for days or at least hours, at a time, to recover.
Yet the world, in response to global warming and climate change, has NOT shifted gears. More coal plants does NOt represent admitting that increased energy output is unsustainable.
It has been my goal in recent years to experiment with virtual solutions to global warming. The recent NY Times Sunday magazine section is an encyclopaedia of earth/ climate friendly ideas and solutions. There is a bandwagon but so far it is restricted, with most artists at the sidelines.
Today I sent out a press release for Earth Day, reiterating what I've been doing and why, about virtuality and global warming. What I don't explicitly say but that is implied in the image, is the exhaustion of doing this despite CFS. What I think about that, is that just as we must spend some up front cash now to mitigate the worst effects later, so have I been spending my stamina.
This weekend I will be in Ithaca, New York, at the Level Green Institute there, as part of a weekend symposium on what we can do, a precursor to an UNESCO event in 2009. I had proposed a virtual project as a public art event for the weekend. The organizer, Patricia Haines. explained that the financial powers that be didn't get it. So my task this weekend, will be to try to help them get why it's critical to support artists who are experimenting with virtual solutions to global warming.
Not a moment too soon.
The Ghost Nets project was based on the premise that just like acupuncture might cure my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) by identifying places where energy is blocked, critical points in the landscape could be identified for restoration, with larger impacts. In the future, I'd like to devise and find funding to prove whether that can be proven.
Meanwhile, the process of actually doing that, restoring the former coastal dump site of Ghost Nets on Vinalhaven Island, despite being debilitated by CFS, has meant that I have had to work very slowly, learn a lot and depend on the kindness and interest of others. These were lessons I have needed to learn as much about healing myself, as healing the land.
One of the things I had to learn was just how interdependent my personal healing would be with the land's healing. This was something I had intuited & presumed, but living it over a ten year period was a different experience. A lot of what I experienced was adapting to and accepting the uncertain consequences of risks I chose to take. This is a difficult lesson for anyone but it is the same sort of lesson we need to learn to cope with global warming.
For me, that has meant paying attention to bottom lines of how I take care of myself. At the Ghost Nets site, that meant sitting and studying the plants, the winds, the volunteer indigenous interactions and the persistent eruptions of of exotic species- from meadow grass to green crabs: monitoring the site. That monitoring is always as much about the physical, external site as about my own well-being.
When my journals indicate I am chronically exhausted, more than my usual exhaustion, to the point where I can't care for myself, that is a warning sign that the means I'm applying are unsustainable. When I can't sustain myself, I can't do much for my sites.
In the case of Ghost Nets, the risks I've been taking have included to trust my judgement as an artist to interpret and apply what I was reading, discussing and naturalistically observing about questions that are basically scientific. Since there was no institution to support me and I was devoting my limited time, finances and stamina to an uncertain cause, it sometimes felt very scary. Thatw as especially true as time went on.
The risks we take today to invest in strategies to address global warming are equally problemmatic. The trick in all these models is to move forward short of collapsing the very systems we want to save.
My premise, that critical Trigger Points can become points of biological leverage, may be extrapolated to global warming. It is for that reason that Ghost Nets continues to be my source of inspiration. It remains a metaphor, an avatar of how I continue to work on recovery from CFS. The Ghost Nets site as landscape Trigger Point, CFS and global warming are all like mirrors within mirrors, riddles with as yet vague answers.
The Ghost Nets project was based on the premise that just like acupuncture might cure my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) by identifying places where energy is blocked, critical points in the landscape could be identified for restoration, with larger impacts. In the future, I'd like to devise and find funding to prove whether that can be proven.
Meanwhile, the process of actually doing that, restoring the former coastal dump site of Ghost Nets on Vinalhaven Island, despite being debilitated by CFS, has meant that I have had to work very slowly, learn a lot and depend on the kindness and interest of others. These were lessons I have needed to learn as much about healing myself, as healing the land.
One of the things I had to learn was just how interdependent my personal healing would be with the land's healing. This was something I had intuited & presumed, but living it over a ten year period was a different experience. A lot of what I experienced was adapting to and accepting the uncertain consequences of risks I chose to take. This is a difficult lesson for anyone but it is the same sort of lesson we need to learn to cope with global warming.
For me, that has meant paying attention to bottom lines of how I take care of myself. At the Ghost Nets site, that meant sitting and studying the plants, the winds, the volunteer indigenous interactions and the persistent eruptions of of exotic species- from meadow grass to green crabs: monitoring the site. That monitoring is always as much about the physical, external site as about my own well-being.
When my journals indicate I am chronically exhausted, more than my usual exhaustion, to the point where I can't care for myself, that is a warning sign that the means I'm applying are unsustainable. When I can't sustain myself, I can't do much for my sites.
In the case of Ghost Nets, the risks I've been taking have included to trust my judgement as an artist to interpret and apply what I was reading, discussing and naturalistically observing about questions that are basically scientific. Since there was no institution to support me and I was devoting my limited time, finances and stamina to an uncertain cause, it sometimes felt very scary. Thatw as especially true as time went on.
The risks we take today to invest in strategies to address global warming are equally problemmatic. The trick in all these models is to move forward short of collapsing the very systems we want to save.
My premise, that critical Trigger Points can become points of biological leverage, may be extrapolated to global warming. It is for that reason that Ghost Nets continues to be my source of inspiration. It remains a metaphor, an avatar of how I continue to work on recovery from CFS. The Ghost Nets site as landscape Trigger Point, CFS and global warming are all like mirrors within mirrors, riddles with as yet vague answers.
This past month, I have struggled to function on a high professional level, despite knowing that I am in a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome relapse. I showed up at openings, in meetings woth colleagues and patrons, completed and sent work to various venues and perfomed Virtual Concerts faithfully every Tuesday. But this week, I began to realize I would have to admit defeat. Things began going wrong here and there. A bill was paid late. An argument with a friend. Excruciating pain I couldn't ignore and so on.
That's also how global warming works. You keep trying to do things the same old same way. But then a tornado hits a part of the world that doesn't have tornados. People begin to starve from prolonged droughts and they riot or die. Wars erupt in competitions over resources. A hurricane hits a city and obliterates it.
And eventually, one has to admit defeat. The defeat of arrogance at any rate. Arrogance that we can continue as tho we are immune to this abstraction, whether we call it an illness of the body or of the earth. And then comes the grief for what is lost.
When I grieve for the implications of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, it is for the lost income that forces untenable choices on me- for the alternative health I cannot afford and my insurance doesn't cover but that does alleviate my symptoms. For the periods of isolated bed rest I endure from time to time. Opportunities and joys that pass me by. And then I accept a measure of humility. And it is humility that must be embraced if we would limit our use of resources in this world.
And when I hit bottom, as I did a couple days ago, something makes me remember that all is not lost yet: as when I walked by a park, almost too weak to continue to take one more step forward and stood transfixed for fifteen minutes watching two squirrels chasing and tumbling eachother around the base of a tree surrounded by yellow daffodils with orange trumpets and tulips of apricot mixed with gold.
It is painful to forego the travel or the air conditioner or the imported foods for Westerners that contribute to a large carbon footprint. Far more painful to see someone else die because of our insouciance. Most painful of all, when we suffer the consequences of our own resistance to an honest accounting of reality.
Life is so beautiful and precious. Isn't the greatest gift we might give back reconciliatory, a respect for and peace with life's limits?
on It's about global warming, my friend 72dpi